News and views about the implementation of the Right of Children to Free and Compulsory Education Act 2009 and other legislation, schemes and policies impacting the Right to Education of India's Children.

Cotton creates dropouts in Vidarbha

It is the beginning of June and 14-year-old Somirao
Kavdu Madavi from Yavatmal's Madhavpur village is getting ready with his
bags. But he is not going to school. A Standard 4 dropout, he is set to
leave for a cotton farm where he works all year around. His family gets
Rs. 25,000 for his 12 months of work. The amount, he states, is
difficult for his family to let go.

As agriculture is
not specifically disallowed for children under 14 under the Child
Labour (Prevention and Regulation) Act 1986, farmers across Maharashtra
employ children: sometimes as full-time labourers like Somirao,
otherwise as daily labourers as and when they need them.

Activists say it leads to children missing out on education altogether. Vidarbha is a glaring example of this.

Somirao
is not the only one in his tribal village of Kolam Adivasis who has had
to drop out of school to help support his family. His work includes
everything — from sowing to spraying pesticide to cotton picking. “I had
just come home for a three-day holiday,” he said.

He
struggled to recollect when he had dropped out of school. “I studied
till Standard 4,” he said, which would mean till the age of 9. For the
last five years, he had been working.

“We have no
other source of income. I am probably earning more than anyone in my
family. What can my parents do when there is poverty to face?” His
parents, who do not own any piece of land, work as farm labourers in
nearby villages.

“While the amount of children
working in agriculture, and thus losing access to education is more in
Yavatmal, there is largely a societal ‘sanction' for using children for
farm work all over Vidarbha,” says Suresh Bolenwar, a farmer-activist
with the Vidarbha Jan Anolan Samiti (VJAS).

Yavatmal
is one of the worst-affected districts of the agrarian crisis, he adds.
“Rs 25,000 is more than what the parents would earn through the
National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, if it is implemented fully.
It is difficult to pull the children out when the needs of the family
are concerned.”

In the nearby Hiwra village,
13-year-old Gajanan Uike tells a tale similar to Somirao's. He works in a
farm for Rs. 25,000 which, he states, is the ‘going rate' this year. He
has studied till Standard 3, till the age of eight, and dropped out
later to “support the family.”

But not everybody is
lucky to get jobs that guarantee to pat for the whole year, says
Gajanan's 15-year-old friend Ajay Meshram. He works as farm labour
whenever there is a demand. He has studied till the Standard 7.

“I
get Rs. 100 a day. I also work in my own farm. If I find someone who
will keep me on their farm for the whole year, I will go. Now, I barely
earn Rs. 1,500 a month. You will call it child labour, but at least we
get steady income,” he stated.

Asked if they would
have liked to continue studying, both Ajay and Gajanan said they now
wished they were pushed to study more. “But what is the guarantee?
People who have studied more than us have no jobs,” Ajay adds, as an
after-thought.

Girls too are part of the many
children in the region dropping out of school at an early age. Vrinda
Atram, Surekha Rampure and Parvati Tekam of Ambezari village have said
they are enrolled in ashramshalas meant for tribal children, but their
attendance is irregular as they have to travel to different villages to
find work. The day this correspondent met them, they were waiting at a
bus stop, with food and clothes to last them for a week, in search of
work.

“Someone told us we could find work in the
chilli fields here, but everyone has finished picking chilli. Now we
have to wait till we find something else,” says 13-year-old Surekha. She
and Vrinda have dropped out after Standard 6, while Parvati is still
studying in Standard 9. “The school does not care if we don't show up.
For everyday of work that we get in the field, we get Rs.100-150. So
nobody complains,” Vrinda, 13, said.

The NGO, Save
the Children, has been working in some of the districts in Vidarbha,
trying to encourage farmers and parents to stop children from working,
in order to complete their education up to the age of 14, as mandated by
the Right to Education Act. In the last three years, the organisation
claims to have mainstreamed more than 12,000 children in 986 villages:
some had completely dropped out while some were irregular for months.
And yet, villages across Yavatmal are untouched by intervention by any
organisation.

In the villages that are supported by
Save the Children, farmers say the number of child labour has gone down,
“but it is difficult to refuse needy parents.”

In
Amravati's Dadhi village in Bhatkuli taluka Dudarao Telmore, a landless
labourer stated that his daughter Kiran had to give up education at 12
years to help feed the family. “There is no other way. The school is six
km away. She cannot do both: work and go to school,” he said. Kiran,
now 16, works on the fields in the cotton-growing season and otherwise
settles for odd jobs.

At a farmers' gathering in
Dabhade village in Amravati district, cotton growers lament that parents
themselves are insisting on making their children work. “What the
government pays us farmers is not enough, and so we cannot give the
labourers enough money. So they eventually get their children to work on
the fields too,” says Triambak Raut, a farmer.

“We
know that we cannot afford agriculture: the labourers cannot afford to
be just labourers. So they have to send their kids to the farm to work.”
For some, it is justified because the parents can then pay for the
children's education and other needs. “The children work in the sowing
season in f June, just before the rains. At least then the rest of the
year the children can go to school in peace,” Devidas Patil said.

Ashok
Pingale, State programme manager of Save the Children, believes that
the discrepancy between the Child Labour Act and the RTE is holding back
the spread of basic education. “Only if the government bans all forms
of child labour for children under 14 under the Child Labour Act, as
recommended in one of the amendments, will we be able to realise the
potential of the Right to Education Act fully.”

National
Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) member Yogesh Dube,
who recently released a study that said child labour is prevalent in
cotton seed farming in Andhra Pradesh, said the Commission was not aware
of the children working on cotton fields in Maharashtra. “If we get
media reports about the occurrence we will definitely look into it,” he
told The Hindu.